The Goldilocks board is an Arduino clone, but instead of using the ATmega328p of the Uno, or the ATmega2560 of the Mega, it uses the ATmega1284p micro-controller. It has the same form factor of the Uno, but more SRAM, in fact it has eight times more, and that’s actually twice as much as the Mega.

Feature

ATmega328p

ATmega1284p

ATmega2560p

Cost

$2.99

$4.66

$11.28

SRAM

2k

16k

8k

Flash RAM

32k

128k

256k

EEPROM

1k

4k

4k

USART

1

2

2

Digital I/O Pins

23

32

86

Analog I/O Pins

6

8

16

Interrupt Timers

2

3

8

Switching the processor also means that it has two programmable USART, separate I²C bus pins, and extra 16 bit timer, four times the Flash and twice the EEPROM of the Uno. The board also has a µSDCard slot and space for prototyping. But the main advantage for a lot of people is going to be that extra SRAM for your sketch to run inside.

The recent announcement of the Arduino GSM Shield added another benefit over the Uno since the two pins designated to be the USART pins Tx/Rx on the GSM Shield match the pins proposed for the hardware USART1 Tx1/Rx1 on the Goldilocks. Which means that the full AVR hardware USART Interrupt, error flag, and timing capability would be available for communications with the GSM shield, unlike the Uno where a software USART is used instead.

TheirPozible campaign is fully funded, but still has eighteen days on the clock if you’re interested in getting a board. Estimated delivery is July and it promises to be fully Arduino-compatible and ship with the necessary board definition files so that you can use it in the Arduino IDE. More details can be found on Philip’s blog.

Alasdair Allan is a scientist, author, hacker and tinkerer, who is spending a lot of his time thinking about the Internet of Things. In the past he has mesh networked the Moscone Center, caused a U.S. Senate hearing, and contributed to the detection of what was—at the time—the most distant object yet discovered.

I really like the idea of making an arduino with the shield layout pins, but also having some right next to them with proper spacing for using regular protoboards as shields. It’s almost trivially easy to do when designing the board. Awesome!